UDFs are now deprecated in Firebird 4. See the list of known incompatibilites. Users who still wish to use UDFs should set “UdfAccess” to “Restrict <path-list>”. The Recommended long-term solution is the replacement of UDFs with UDRs.

Upscene announces the availability of version 2 of "Hopper" a stored routine debugger for InterBase, Firebird and MySQL. This version includes support for Firebird 3 packages and stored functions, MySQL diagnostic-statements, binary data in variables amongst other things.

19-Oct-2017

The first (beta) version (200 pages and incomplete) of the German translation of Firebird 2.5 Language Reference is now available. With thanks to Martin Koeditz.

18-Oct-2017

node-firebird 0.8.4 has been released with a Typescript definition file.

Bipost (beta) a simple database synchronisation tool that can synchronise Microsoft SQL Server and Firebird (Windows) to any given Amazon Aurora MySQL database.

31-Aug-2017

SouchProd.EntityFrameworkCore.Firebird - is an Entity Framework Core provider built on top of the Firebird ADO.NET Data Provider. It enables use the Entity Framework Core 2.0 ORM with Firebird.

30-Aug-2017

ADO.NET provider 5.11.0.0 for Firebird is available with .NET Standard 2.0 support. Also in this release is support for passing a key over the wire for encrypted databases. More details can be found on the tracker.

28-Aug-2017

ADO.NET provider 5.10.0.0 for Firebird is available. An overview of all the changes can be found on the tracker.

The "Documentation Funding 2017" has eached more than $3,000 of the £5,000 goal. The Firebird project needs some more help to reach the target.

07-Jul-2017

We have a beta version of an installable 64bit Firebird 3.0.3 for MacOSX. It runs by default as SuperServer currently (as it should) with no simple way to switch to Classic/SuperClassic (yet). If any one wants a copy to download, install and test - please send Paul Beach an email.

Firebird Docker has been updated to 3.0.2 and 2.5.7 (Created by Jacob Alberty). This docker image is based on Debian Jessie.

22-May-2017

ADO.NET provider for Firebird V5.9.1.0 is available for download. One small new feature has been added - support for [CREATE|ALTER|DROP] FUNCTION in FirebirdSql.Data.Isql for Firebird 3. Release Notes.

ADO.NET provider 5.9.0.0 for Firebird is available. Because there are quite a few changes in FbRemoteEvent Jiri wrote a separate article explaining all the changes. Also an overview of changes can be found in tracker.

Jaybird 3.0.0-beta-2 is available for testing. We would really appreciate if you could start testing your applications with this version and provide feedback on stability and behaviour, but also on the release notes. Feedback can be sent to the Firebird-java mailinglist or on the issue tracker

Jaybird 3.0 is a big change from Jaybird 2.2 and earlier. We have rewritten the entire low-level implementation to be able to support protocol improvements in newer Firebird versions, we have made changes with a stricter interpretation of the JDBC requirements, and we have removed some parts that were either obsolete or not functioning correctly.

We recommend that you do not consider Jaybird 3.0 a drop-in replacement for Jaybird 2.2, and study the release notes carefully.

From Mark Rotteveel: "Jaybird 3.0.0-beta-1 has been published for testing. We would really appreciate if you could start testing your applications with this
version and provide feedback on stability and behavior, but also on the release notes.

Feedback can be sent to the Firebird-java mailinglist or on the issue tracker.

Jaybird 3.0 is a big change from Jaybird 2.2 and earlier. We have rewritten the entire low-level implementation to be able to support protocol improvements in newer Firebird versions, we have made changes with a stricter interpretation of the JDBC requirements, and we have removed some parts that were either obsolete or not functioning correctly.

We recommend that you do not consider Jaybird 3.0 a drop-in replacement for Jaybird 2.2, and study the release notes carefully.

ADO.NET provider for Firebird is available for download. One new notable feature - the driver now includes compression support for Firebird 3. To use compression add Compression=True to your connection string. By default it’s turned off.

05-Oct-2016

Today is the last chance to register for the Firebird Conference. There is still a chance to come to the conference and communicate with the Firebird developers and leading Firebird experts.

I didn’t found explicit mentioning support of the function features per compiler, but seems very basic feature for lambdas so I put it there.

I tested clang++ 3.8.0, g++ 5.4.0 and MSVC 14".

15-Sep-2016

Firebird Conference 2016 - Papers

Featured speaker: Jason Wharton, IBObjects

Optimizing queries and transactions

This session will demonstrate how to make effective use of queries and transactions so that your application has reliable record locking as well as smooth performance. There are some potential traps developers can fall into that I will identify and help you avoid.

This session will provide a good overview of the various approaches to interacting with your database. Direct transaction control, cached updates and multi-tier approaches will be discussed. I will also address proper use of generators/sequences and show how to provide an auditable sequence that is multi-user friendly.

13-Sep-2016

Firebird ADO.NET provider 5.1.1.0 is available for download. More details can be found in the Release Notes.

sessions from Alex Peshkoff, Firebird Core developer on how to integrate Firebird into the corporate security infrastructure, how to make data in a Firebird databases more secure,

Encrypting Firebird databases

The session will describe the problems and solutions for database encryption inside the enterprise and for distributed applications. What should be protected on the plugin level, what should be protected at the operating system level (parameters to be set/tuned), where security keys should be stored, etc.

Implementing a safe authorisation infrastructure

How to use different authorisation plugins, several security databases, how to define and implement data transfer between databases governed by different security databases, and how to use the TraceAPI and the Services API in such an environment.

The talks announced below will be devoted to the most popular questions regarding Firebird performance.

Dmitry Yemanov, lead Firebird developer

Firebird and disk I/O

Disk access is the most expensive operation in any database and RDBMS vendors use a lot of tricks to get most of this area. Providing durability ("D" in ACID) is especially important as it introduces an obvious conflict between reliability and performance. This session describes various durability aspects at three different levels -- Firebird, operating system and storage hardware -- and explains how they interact with each other, what tuning options are effective and how to balance between them. We'll talk about forced writes, OS-level caching, journaling, filesystem barriers, etc.

Alexey Kovyazin, IBSurgeon

Diagnosing and fixing Firebird performance problems

The question «how to find and eliminate performance problems in Firebird» is important for all database developers. Firebird offers the number of tools and APIs to answer the question: transaction markers, MON$ tables, TraceAPI, databases and queries performance statistics, and this session will describe how to find the exact reason of slowness in the particular database. We will consider the practical examples of problems and appropriate fixes, based on real-life logs from the production Firebird databases.

Paul Reeves, IBPhoenix

Firebird performance comparisons

This session will provide performance comparisons between Firebird 3 and Firebird 2.5 using a test harness based upon TPC-C. The data is derived from hours of testing covering different hardware and software configurations taking into consideration things like Server Architecture, Memory, Database size, HDD/SSD etc This should enable us to build a full picture of the impact of how a single configuration change can affect overall performance. Some of the questions this session will answer: does the improved multi-threading in Firebird 3 bring benefits under heavy load? Is SuperClassic still relevant? What is the penalty for using network compression and encryption? Does database encryption sacrifice speed for security?

29-Aug-2016

A new version of the ADO.NET provider (5.1.0.0) for Firebird is ready for download. Changes or improvements include support for new fields in MON$ATTACHMENTS and support for “-skip_data” in backup/restore. And finally some nice simple performance tweaks around Charset class.
An overview of changes can be found in the tracker.

26-Aug-2016

Firebird Conference 2016 - Papers.

Two talks from Jiri Cincura, developer of Firebird .NET driver.

How to implement the full-text search using only PSQL

Firebird at the moment does not have native support for full-text search. So you are either out of luck or you have to use syntax using the LIKE or CONTAINING expressions. Luckily if you lower the bar a little (what features the search has to cover) and focus on core functionality, it is possible to create a very fast full-text search using only fairly simple PSQL and some out-of-the-box thinking. Production examples will be included.

What's new in Firebird.NET Provider

With the release of Firebird 3.0 a lot has changed in .NET provider. Some features from Firebird 3 are already supported now and there are also a lot of changes and improvements in other areas. This session will walk you through most of these improvements and changes and will show you how to use these and show how these work in Firebird and how you can benefit from using them.

23-Aug-2016

Firebird Conference 2016 - Papers.

Philippe Makowski, the maintainer of Linux packages for Firebird and the vice-president of Firebird Foundation, will present 2 topics at the Firebird Conference 2016:

Firebird SQL best practices

This session will be devoted to the review of SQL features available in Firebird that people often forget about: Merge, Common Table Expressions, Window Functions, etc. There will be a special focus on how to emulate a loose index scan using a recursive CTE. The term "loose index scan" is used in other databases for the operation of using a b-tree index to retrieve the distinct values of a column efficiently, rather than scanning all equal values of a key, as soon as a new value is found, restart the search by looking for a larger value. This is much faster when the index has many equal keys.

Managing Firebird with Ansible

This session will cover the topics listed below:
General information about configuration management and benefits of using configuration management tools Ansible overview and advantages of Ansible compared to other configuration management tools Basics of Ansible such as roles, tasks, handlers, modules, playbooks etc
Information about the Ansible Firebird module (a preview of this new module) and its usage with some examples. A playbook example using the Firebird module, covering managing Firebird Databases on AWS systems, RedHat, Debian, Mageia hosts, and Windows hosts.

Mark Rotteveel just published Jaybird 3.0.0-alpha-1 for testing. He would appreciate if you could start testing your applications with this version and provide feedback on stability and behaviour, but also on the release notes.

Jaybird 3.0 is a big change from Jaybird 2.2 and earlier. We have rewritten the entire low-level implementation to be able to support protocol improvements in newer Firebird versions, we have made changes with a stricter interpretation of the JDBC requirements, and we have removed some parts that were either obsolete or not functioning correctly.

We recommend that you do not consider Jaybird 3.0 a drop-in replacement for Jaybird 2.2, and study the release notes carefully. The release files are on github.

Innovative lists of values acting also as data entry forms and means of navigation through interrelated data. Innovative menus that integrate breadcrumbs and ordinary menus. Out of the box Query By Example mechanism. Client side programming language as an easy to grasp subset of PL/SQL. Used to program user interaction and remotely call stored procedures.

Techniques and design recommendations to detect and prevent an attack. Client and server side session state components. Pooled database connections as a means to reduce server load. Scalability and reliability by reducing network traffic and the database server load. Incremental data transfer between client and server. Single page architecture. Locking strategies.

Automation of all the development steps including deployment of the application to the integrated test web server. Pre-configured web server.

Free use of CloudaIDE for FirebirdSQL based development and deployment. The project site is http://cloudaide.org

On Fireird Support, Martin Schriber "I am the author of the very sophisticated and very unknown cross platform development environment MSEide+MSEgui for Free Pascal which has excellent Firebird support".

Mark Rotteveel announces "I have just published a new snapshot version of Jaybird 3.0 for testing. Release notes Feedback and comments are welcome. Post bug reports on the tracker. You can get the snapshot through maven/gradle/etc if you have the Sonatype OSS snapshot repository configured.
Alternatively you can download it from Sourceforge.

Si Carter has released Firebird Stored Procedure Generator V2.1 , this version introduces a new option to build a class library, complete business object layer and data access layer for accessing all generated stored procedures in C# (other languages are planned for future versions).

The Firebird Conference will take place on the 7th and 8th of October 2016, Prague, Czech Republic. More details.

17-May-2016

Firebird ADO.NET provider 5.0.0.0 has been released. This release contains two new major features, both focused on Firebird 3. The BOOLEAN datatype is now supported (except Entity Framework mapping, currently). and SRP authentication. An overview of the changes can be found on the Tracker.

Mark Rotteveel published a new Jaybird 3.0.0-SNAPSHOT.
Download available on maven (on the Sonatype
snapshots repository) or SourceForge. Updated Release Notes are also available. Feedback on the stability, performance and undocumented changes in behaviour would be appreciated.

The Firebird project repository has been migrated to GitHub.
Please wait a few days for things to settle down, we need to update some infrastructure issues. The SVN repository is still accessible, but new contributions are expected to be provided as pull requests at GitHub.

When creating a GitHub account, we suggest you add your SourceForge's email (username@users.sourceforge.net) as a secondary one to associate your past contributions with your account.

Adriano, on building Firebird 3.0 RC2 with GCC 6.0.
"First, I have just committed a change for GPRE to generate code compatible with C++-14. I now build in C++-14 mode with these options:

-fno-sized-deallocation: because C++-14 pass the size to the delete operator. Instead of using this option, it would be better to check __cpluplus >= 201402L and do the appropriate change in the sources.

-fno-delete-null-pointer-checks: becase the ->as ->is methods that we call in null pointers. There may be other similar things.

The current status and future prospects of Firebird 2.5 - Actively being maintained. We had two point releases in 2015 and expect two point releases in 2016, with V2.5.6 currently scheduled for March/April. The Firebird release schedule defines a five years long release cycle, and we never deprecate releases younger than two versions back. So V2.5 will be maintained until V4 is out (2017-2018).

Firebird Language Reference 2.5 (English) Beta 1 (pdf) and (html). The review of the translated text has got this far, thanks to the efforts of Paul Vinkenoog and Mark Rotteveel. Unfortunately, we
didn't get any more Englsh speakers to help with the review, so there is still a way to go. (Helen Borrie).

Mark Rotteveel has released a new Jaybird 3.0.0-SNAPSHOT that is available on Maven (via) the Sonatype OSS snapshot repository and also Sourceforge. He would really appreciate it if people would start testing Jaybird 3 with their applications and report problems or incompatibilities. More information is in the Release Notes.

01-Jan-2016

Happy New Year to all Firebird users everywhere.

21-Dec-2015

ADO.NET provider 4.9.0.0 for Firebird is available for download. For additional information read Jiri's blog.

Firebird 2.5 Language Reference - The Firebird Docs team is calling for people who are fluent in both English and Firebird's SQL to assist with reviewing the English text of the Firebird 2.5 Language Reference manual. Of 10 chapters and 8 Appendices, 4.5 chapters are still untouched by reviewers. It would be good to have the reviewing done to coordinate with the forthcoming 2.5.5 release but correctness takes priority. Still to do are: half of the DDL chapter, DML, PSQL, Functions and Variables, Transactions.
If you feel able to help with the review, please subscribe to the [firebird-docs] list and make yourself and your preferred topics known.

12-Nov-2015

Survey about Firebird 3 Installer - The Firebird Project needs your opinions regarding the Windows installer of the forthcoming Firebird 3.0 final release. Please provide your opinions via this survey. Note that your answers will help to define and implement future enhancements. The Survey will be available until 20th Nov 2015.

Firebird ADO.NET provider V4.8.0.0 for Firebird is available for download. An overview of the changes can be found in bug tracker. Please pay extra attention to DNET-625 and DNET-626 as these might affect your code in an unexpected way.

Firebird for Android: Alex Peshkov has produced a test version of Firebird 3 for Android. Archives with tools for accessing databases in embedded mode are now available to download and test. Note that embedded Firebird can be used also as a client to access remote Firebird servers. Please help with the testing and giving us feedback.

17-Mar-2015

Nodejs Firebird driver version V0.6.0 is released with a critical problem with Transactions now fixed.

Roman Simakov: "I have ported BenchmarkSQL for Firebird. It's a TPC-C test that works via JDBC and supports PostgreSQL, Oracle, DB2 and now Firebird. It would be useful to know where we are compared to other RDBMSs. Please share you investigations.

06-Mar-2015

Nodejs Firebird V0.5.1 is released with support for the Firebird Service Manager functions.

05-Mar-2015

Adriano dos Santos Fernandes (on the Firebird Development list): "I just built an example of Firebird 3 API usage with FreePascal. As said earlier, working with input/output buffers directly in non-C/C++ is difficult. This requires auxiliary classes.
The others things seem ok and easy to use. We need some new functions in the new API, for example, to convert."
status vectors to strings, but this is not specific to Pascal.

02-Mar-2015

Nodejs Firebird driver V0.4.0 is released with initial support for the Services Manager

According to its lifetime release policy, the Firebird Project gives notice that the Firebird V2.1 series has reached its end-of-life and will not be maintained anymore. The last official release in this series, is Firebird 2.1.7, which was announced in December 2014, it will continue to be available for download, but will no longer be supported by the Firebird Project. Support if required is available from IBPhoenix.

21-Jan-2015

SQL-MVC - The author has created a new concept in web application frameworks, using Firebird and node.js,
and would appreciate any comments, especially on the concepts behind it. The compiler takes your application code, SQL statements, directives and properties and produces all the database code as a single stored procedure, to be run to produce JSON output. A Mustache Template (Hogan) containing all the client side code to be filled with the JSON. When the two are combined in the browser everything happens.
The server node.js does very little other than pass JSON between the server and client. All the business logic remains in the database server. You have full control of the client side look, feel and behaviour, the default framework and theme is just to give you a quick start. Comments.

ADO.NET provider V4.5.2.0 for Firebird is available. This is a small release with the "no garbage collect" option for the connection string (contributed) and improvements in NuGet packages by helping you to add DbProviderFactories item.

Thomas Steinmaurer (video) discusses different aspects on how to use the Firebird Trace API and FB TraceManager in high load (production) scenarios.

17-Oct-2014

More mini-interviews with speakers at Firebird Conference 2014

Jiri Cincura, developer of Firebird.NET

— Jiri, why do you think people will be interested most of all in your presentation?

If you're an .NET developer working with Firebird you need to catch up with all the changes that happened during a year. There's a lot of improvements and you might actually benefit from some of these pretty well. Also might be a good recap of some new features in Firebird.

— What do you like most of all in Firebird? and What is your most favourite feature/improvement in Firebird 3?

— How clean and transparent is in outside. I'm really looking for proper SMP support. Also as a provider writer the external stored procedures/triggers/... are really interesting. Although there's probably a lot of work to do (and it's not moving further much).
See you soon in Prague!

Pavel Cisar, IBPhoenix

Pavel , What do you think people will be interested in most of all in your presentations?

IBPhoenix provides information, support and development services to Firebird users for fourteen years, so we've got a lot of experience with a wide range of problems that these users encounter. We're creative and always look for new ways how to solve their problems more effectively, and where appropriate we make tools that help us get the job done. In my presentation I'll share my experiences using monitoring tables and trace and audit services to solve various problems. I'll focus on what they are good for and the methods and tools that worked best for me.

— What do you like most of all in Firebird? and What is your most favorite feature/improvement in Firebird 3?

Firebird is simple (to use and manage) yet is also a very powerful and flexible engine with great support (drivers, libraries, applications etc.) and vibrant community. It's not good for everything, but works well for most cases. I'll always go with Firebird as my first choice, and look for other solutions only in rare cases where Firebird is not good enough.

About Firebird 3, it's hard to pick one favorite feature/improvement as every one of them is important and contributes IMHO equally to make V3 an awesome release.

— Carlos, why do you think people will be interested most of all in your talk?

My talk about Data Auditing logs is based on a solution that I have been using for the last 6 years, in my own ERP. It was created because from time to time I got contacted by customers saying that some
information simply disappeared from the database, or got modified without nobody editing it, suggesting that the software had some bug <g>. With auditing logs, it became really easy to show/prove to
the customer what really happened, allowing you to keep a history of everything that was done inside the database.

The other talk is about Numerics in Firebird. Due to the several different datatypes available for storing numbers in Firebird, each one with different characteristics/behaviors, it is possible for
developers to get confused about their differences and what would be the best type to use for a specific requirement. This talk will try to answer those
questions, as well show some tips, tricks and side-effects that sometimes are not known by the developer, showing also the actual rules
used in the maths involving numeric/decimal types.

— What do you like most of all in Firebird and what is your most favourite feature/improvement in Firebird 3?

I have used Firebird since its first release, and what I really enjoy about it is the fact that it is small, easy to install and configure, very stable, has low maintenance and, of course, it is totally free!

Firebird 3 is long awaited for its improvements related to extracting all the potential of SMP machines, even when shared cache is being used. Of course, this feature is a must in the current world where SMP machines have become the standard configuration for servers. But FB 3 also brings some very nice features, and I really enjoy the fact that now we can encrypt the database file and the wired communication, and the wire protocol has improved allowing better performance in high latency
networks.

08-Oct-2014

Adriano dos Santos Fernandes - I put onto my github account the first version of cloop (Cross Language Object Oriented Programming). This first version is limited to void and int datatypes, supports C, C++ and Free Pascal, and the makefile works only in POSIX.

03-Oct-2014

Mini-interview about the Firebird Conference 2014 with Mark Rotteveel. Today's guest is Mark Rotteveel, developer of JayBird, the Firebird JDBC driver, and speaker at the Firebird Conference 2014.

— Mark, What do you think people will find most interesting in your presentation/talk?

I have two talks scheduled. My first talk is about the current state of development of Jaybird, and the changes implemented (and to be implemented) for Jaybird 3.0. I think this is interesting for people who use Jaybird and want to know more about the upcoming changes.

My second talk is about using Hibernate and jOOQ to query a Firebird database from Java without having to deal with the low-level JDBC operations. Hibernate is a ORM mapper, while jOOQ is - besides a (light-weight) ORM mapper - a Domain Specific Language (DSL) library for building queries with compile time checks. Both are also useful to bridge dialect differences between various databases.

Although introductory, I think this is interesting for application developers, even when their target platform isn't Java.

— What do you like most of all in Firebird? And what is your favourite feature/improvement in Firebird 3?

I think the key thing about Firebird is its simplicity and small footprint, install it and you are - basically - good to go. I think my favorite new feature in Firebird 3 are the window functions. They provide much needed extensions for analytical queries.

This year I've spent quite a bit of time working on a test harness that produces consistent output, and above all, a database to store and analyse the data produced by the tests. The results are quite surprising and to me at least, very interesting. I'm certainly enjoying putting the presentation together and hopefully it will be enjoyable for people to sit through.

— What do you like most of all in Firebird?

The pace of development. I know we seem to be behind schedule on v3 but I'm barely up to speed with the new features that have been added in v2.n. A lot of the things that used to be difficult back in the day (I've been using Firebird since IB4) are so easy now. The way text blobs can be converted to and from strings, the way sql statements can be constructed on the fly in stored procedures, the fact that domains can now be used consistently in SPs - these are just a few of the things that make database development easier. And of course there are monitoring tables, db and txn triggers. And loads more stuff besides.

— What is your most favourite feature/improvement in Firebird 3?

It is too early to say. There is so much new stuff in v3 that it will take me a while to get on top of it all. Probably best to ask me in about two years time :)

26-Sep-2014

Mini-interview with Ann W. Harrison

We are starting series or mini-interviews with speakers of Firebird International Conference 2014. The first guest is Ann W. Harrison:

— Ann, what do you think people will be interested most of all in your presentation/talk?

Ann: — Both talks address concerns that are of interest the most novice of Firebird users ("Why does gfix think my database is broken?" and "What's the big deal about multi-threading"). The talks start with the basics and then move into more complex understanding of the underlying issues (careful write, threading alternatives) that may suggest future directions for Firebird.

Jim Starkey and I will share both talks. I'll address the way things are now, using my experience on the Firebird Support list to respond to common questions.
Jim will talk about his post-Firebird experiences - he's written four more relational databases, each with different ways of dealing with on-disk consistency (the gfix issue) and threading.

— What do you like most of all in Firebird? and - what is your most favourite feature/improvement in Firebird 3?

Ann: The best feature of Firebird, from my perspective, is that it doesn't fight back. It's easy to install, requires very little tuning, and runs on lots of different platforms in multiple configurations: embedded, classic, and now multi-theaded server. Performance and reliability are givens - without them, you can't have a product.
I also like the fact that Firebird can be distributed with commercial products without a license fee, so it's attractive to application builders outside the US.

As for V3, beyond question, my favorite feature is the multi-threaded shared server. Giving users the full use of their multi-processor servers without the overhead of a process per connection really moves Firebird into a new era.

Thank you, and see you soon in Prague!

24-Sep-2014

We'd like to invite you to the Firebird event of the year - The Firebird International Conference 2014.

It will last for 2 days, and takes place on October 24-25th, in Prague. The Conference will be devoted to 2 main topics: Firebird 3 features and Firebird performance.

With Firebird 3 Beta 1 (due to be announced next week) you will be in a position to start testing, doing development or considering migration to Firebird 3.0, and, since Firebird 3.0's SuperServer configuration shows three times better performance than Firebird 2.5 SuperClassic, it is probably not a bad idea!
(Note: There will be special sessions devoted to performance testing and comparison of Firebird 3.0 v's Firebird 2.5.)

Dmitry Yemanov and Vlad Khorsun (core developers of Firebird) will present detailed explanations of the new features in Firebird 3.0, with a focus on its architectural changes and advantages which this new technology will give to Firebird users.

There will be two very special speakers at Firebird Conference: Ann Harrison and Jim Starkey (the original creator of InterBase), presenting interesting topics about multi-threading and orphan database pages.

There will be sessions devoted to the new abilities of performance monitoring with Firebird 3.0 enhancements, and a session about Firebird database recovery and how to avoid possible database corruption.

The developers responsible for the Firebird JDBC/.NET drivers will also be at the conference, so this is a good chance to ask questions about optimal performance and future development.

And, as usual, Firebird Conference is also is good place to meet with existing friends and make new friends, to find like-minded people and get invaluable experience and conversation.

An early snapshot of Jaybird V3.0 is available for testing purposes. "The protocol implementation has been fundamentally rewritten and changes have been made for stricter JDBC conformance. As a result the driver
might exhibit different behavior than previous versions. Please read the release notes carefully to see if those differences are intentional. Bug reports about undocumented changes in behavior are appreciated."
The driver can be downloaded from Sourceforge or Maven (from the sonatype snapshot repository).

Firebird is on the cover of this month's issue of C++Builder Developer's Journal. The 2-part article inside, by Iskander Shafikov, discusses how to use Firebird in the C++Builder IDE. Serious Firebirders are invited to request a free PDF or HTML copy of this issue.
You can view the preview cover at the BCBJ website for a limited time. To request your free copy, you need to email the Editor-in-Chief.

New experimental features preview in LibreOffice 4.2:
Firebird SQL connector for LibreOffice Base (Andrzej Hunt). When creating a new Database, select Firebird Embedded in the drop down menu (you have to first enable the Experimental features in Tools->Options-> LibreOffice->Advanced). This allows creation of databases that perform many times faster than the previous built-in HSQLDB 1.8, avoiding the C++-to-Java overhead inherent in using HSQLDB. We plan to phase HSQLDB out over the next few releases, and provide a smooth migration path to Firebird. Connecting to modern HSQLDB 2.x external databases remains available through HSQLDB's native interface, namely JDBC.

An update about embedded Firebird on iOS, a new build is available that fixes a problem in how the bin directory located the firebird.msg file etc. A new function realpath added to config_root.cpp for darwin now returns the canonicalized absolute pathname.

ADO.NET provider for Firebird 3.1.1.0 is available. Bug fix for Entity Framework support. More details in the tracker.

12-Aug-2013

A new snapshot version of Jaybird 2.2.4 is available. Most notable changes are support for the Firebird 3.0 alpha 1 BOOLEAN type and support for Java 8. Other changes. Note: This snapshot is intended only for testing purposes.

Security Updates for Firebird 2.5.2 and Firebird 2.1.5 are released. These updates address a remote stack buffer overflow discovered in the Firebird Server during March, 2013. This vulnerability allows an unauthenticated user to crash the server and opens a gate for remote code execution, so it's highly recommended to upgrade your server installations.

The beta version of the IBPhoenix Replicator V4.1 is now available for public testing. Documentation in PDF format. An evaluation key, valid for two weeks, can be accessed via the following web page on ibphoenix.com.

Some news about the development of django-firebird from Maximiliano Robaina.

18-Sep-2012

The Jaybird team would like to invite developers and users of Jaybird to fill out a survey on your use of Jaybird (the Firebird JDBC driver). You can find the survey at http://infopoll.net/live/surveys/s36021.htm. The results of the survey will be used to decide where to focus development of the upcoming Jaybird versions.

The libjaybird22.so (Linux x86) and libjaybird22_64.so (Linux x64) included in the Jaybird 2.2.0 download are incorrectly linked (libstdc++ and libdl are missing from the symbol table).

This manifests itself when the native or embedded protocol is used (jdbc:firebirdsql:native or jdbc:firebirdsql:embedded). The resulting error is UnsatisfiedLinkError occurs in libjaybird22_x64.so undefined symbol: _ZTVN10__cxxabiv117__class_type_infoE

Firebird 2.0.x series has been discontinued. According to its release lifetime policy, the Firebird Project notes that the Firebird V2.0 series has reached the end of its life and will not be maintained anymore. The last official release in this series is Firebird 2.0.7, which was announced earlier this year. However if you want support for your legacy installations, you can still contact us!

From Thomas Steinmaurer. Two new Trace API (FB TraceManager) screencasts are available.
The first discusses using the Trace API to detect parameterized query usage. The second covers the new error/warning tracing capabilities that will be in Firebird V2.5.2.

20-Jun-2012

Hopper (stored procedure debugger) V1.0.1 has been released by Upscene.

Upscene announce V1 of a new product called Hopper. Hopper is a Stored Routine and Trigger Debugger, currently available for Firebird only, an InterBase and MySQL version will follow soon.
More details.

Jaybird V2.2 Beta 1 is available. This release contains the following changes: Enhanced support for JDBC 4.0 (Java 6), Support for JDBC 4.1 (Java 7, including try-with-resources support), Implementation of getGeneratedKeys(), Enhanced support for the services API, Support for 64 bit native libraries for Type 2 / Embedded, A number of bug fixes.

Official FirebirdSQL channel on YouTube with videos from the Firebird Conferencein Luxembourg 2011

02-Jan-2012

You can now find the list of presentations and videos of the Firebird Conference in Luxembourg 2011 at the official Firebird channel on SlideShare.com and YouTube.com. You can find here the list of presentations with available options.

30-Dec-2011

Ricardo Obregón has published the php pdo driver in the Arch Linux Repository.

23-Dec-2011

The IBPhoenix team would like to wish all Firebird users and developers a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Firebird Conference: A list of the most interesting talks is now available.

19-Oct-2011

Part II of Thomas Steinmaurers series of papers on Firebird V3 feautures - DDL triggers can be downloaded (German).

18-Oct-2011

The current edition of the "BI Spektrum" magazine has an article by Thomas Steinmaurer with a case study on techniques for pre-aggregating data in a Data Warehouse using Firebird as
relational backend. (German)

The various command line manuals – gfix, gstat, gsec, gbak and fbmgr – have been updated to Firebird 2.5 specifications.

10-Oct-2011

Ruby Sequel V3.28.0 has been released with a number of Firebird improvements.

09-Oct-2011

Firebird 2.5.1 packages are now available in Fedora 15 updates
Epel6 (RHEL and Centos 6) packages are in testing for one more week according to the Epel policy.
About Mageia 1 they will be in updates soon.
For Mandriva they are in Cooker.

woodsmailbox posted the follwing to the firebird-tools list "I made Firebird packages for Tiny Core Linux if anyone is using it. They are based on the official binaries and using improved start/stop scripts and the layout supports multiple instances.
You can see them here. Build scripts available here.

03-Jun-2011

V2.6.5 of the ADO.NET provider for Firebird is available for download (half maintenance release, half new features). Bug fixes New features and improvements are support for the Trace API in Firebird 2.5, Improvements in SQL generation for the Entity Framework and support for command logging. Slightly faster execution of big queries and other improvements making it more stable...

We need attention of beta-testers for the documentation section for the new Firebird web site. Please look through Documentaion section, try to find your favorite documents/guides/articles and report any problems you find to the bug tracker.

From Philippe Makowski: Firebird V2.1.4 packages for Fedora 13 and 14 and for RHEL4 and 5 and other derivatives (Centos, Scientific Linux) have been pushed into Fedora and Epel repositories. Packages for Mandriva will be avilable soon.

16-Mar-2011

Firebird Foundation: Ansoft Development Ltd, of the Russian Federation, producer of the Avarda range of products, is now a Silver sponsor.

It has been found that V2.5 Classic for Linux has problems with AST delivery if used with glibc 2.5. With glibc 2.7 it works properly. The situation with glibc 2.6 is unknown for now. If your glibc version is lower than 2.7, Please upgrade before using Firebird V2.5 Classic/Superclassic.

Users upgrading to Firebird V2.5 want to know if they can just copy the security2.fdb file from previous versions.

In theory, copying the file should work, but Firebird V2.5 uses a new ODS (On Disk Structure) (11.2). Ideally you should do a backup/restore to 2.5 to update the ODS of security2.fdb, but unfortunately some problems still remain with regard to the use of the new role RDB$ADMIN (which gives SYSDBA rights to normal users). In this case, normal users who were granted RDB$ADMIN role, have problems to using the new SQL commands to CREATE/ALTER/DROP USER.
Firebird V2.5.1 (due at the end of the year) will have a sql script that will fix this problem. So, the best way to move users to 2.5 at the moment, is to recreate them either via gsec or the new CREATE USER statement.

05-Nov-2010

Oracle raises prices for MySQL and removes the transactional engine InnoDB support from the free embedded "Classic" edition leaving only MyISAM. News from "The H Open"